Summer 2014 #2: Dr. Strangelove - Stanley Kubrick (1964)

I’m really powering through all these big directors this year! At the beginning of last summer, I had never seen a Kubrick film. Then I saw A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and 2001: A Space Odyssey in a span of six months. Out of the four I have now seen, this is probably the one most name-dropped in film classes, which I credit to its relative obscurity and period-specific themes, making it a target for film majors to pretentiously throw out in conversation.

The full title, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” is long but indicative of what the film is actually about. It’s less about Dr. Strangelove, the character featured in the gif above, and more about the nuclear apocalypse brought on to end the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the USA. 

At the time, these fears of nuclear warfare had penetrated almost every aspect of American society. Kubrick recognized this panic and satirizes it with a simple, dark comedy about a group of US government members who have top-secret knowledge that basically alerts them to the fact that life as they know it has come to an end. 

A US military officer has ordered an extensive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union without the president’s permission, and about 90% of the film takes place in the War Room while the president and his advisors figure out how to stop it from happening. Most of the comedy comes from General Turgidson, who argues with the president on just about everything.

Also interesting to note, the actor who played Dr. Strangelove, Peter Sellers, forced Kubrick to let him play three characters, including the President and Group Captain Lionel Mandrake. He believed that the success of Kubrick’s previous film, Lolita, was due to his portrayal of multiple characters, and the studio backed him, despite Kubrick’s disagreement with that theory. Watching the film, I would never have noticed this, because they all have vastly different accents and costumes.

The film deals a lot with the hysteria of the Cold War, which proves that comedy is a genuine way to deal with some of the more troubling moments of our world’s history. The ironies of the diplomatic relations are exposed, as Kubrick shows the Russian diplomat being unhelpful and generally sneaky when in the US War Room. The president’s selfishness comes to light, and makes the viewer question what would have actually happened if these events took place when they could have.

In the end, the film takes a strange turn, when dark comedy turns to male fantasy, and a hypothetical think-piece turns into an absurdist comedy. I can’t say I disliked the ending, but it’s definitely not the kind of film you see once and say “Oh that made sense." 

I can however, credit the film for being funny. It ranks as #43 on the IMDb Top 250, and 39 on the AFI Top 100. I don’t think it’s as powerful as The Shining, it’s more of the very slow classic film that suddenly becomes really strange and random at the end kind of film, like 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Day 15: January 17th, 2014: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - Stanley Kubrick

I am upset that I am a day late with this last review, but I still saw it on the right date. The 15th and last film on my list (I have some more classics I want to see this week but I’m already back at school) is actually the third Stanley Kubrick film I’ve seen in the past 6 months. I saw A Clockwork Orange in July, The Shining in December, and now this!

The film is different from the other two in so many ways, but I found it more interesting to spot the similarities. For instance, it resembled A Clockwork Orange in that there was a moment maybe 30 to 45 minutes in the film where you go “Oh… so THIS is the plot.” And it reminded me of The Shining because there were massive amounts of time without dialogue. Both of those things are hard to pull off without losing the audience’s attention, so 2001 makes up for it with incredible visual imagery and insane special effects.

Half the time I was thinking “Isn’t this 1968? How do they do that?” It takes a conscious effort to be impressed by the visual effects in the film, because I have to remind myself just how old this movie is. 45 years before Gravity (2013), 9 years before Star Wars (1977), Stanley Kubrick is doing things no one thought possible in film. And that’s how I kept my interest, because the plot is about as slow as you can imagine.

There is no dialogue for the first and last 20 minutes of the film. The above gif is from the first section of the film, where a group of early hominids deal with the struggles of not having iPhones. Then a black monolith appears one day, and it has an impact of the evolution of the group. Flash forward a few million years, to 2000, and a group of astronauts are getting ready to go to the moon to visit another black monolith that was discovered.

The rest of the film focuses on two astronauts and their supercomputer, HAL 9000, on a mission to Jupiter. They aren’t told much about their mission, and things kind of just go crazy from there.

I was a bit more bored than I thought I’d be, but I blame that on the evolution of movies to fill every second with mesmerizing images so that our tiny attention spans don’t wander. When I put the film into the perspective of its time, what I see is a masterpiece with high critical praise and a groundbreaking use of special effects.

2001: A Space Odyssey is #110 on the IMDb Top 250, but way up at #15 for the AFI 100 Movies. It won one Oscar, for Best Visual Effects, which actually is Stanley Kubrick’s only Oscar.

That concludes my 15th movie review in “15” days. I got through my entire winter movie bucket-list!

Day 7: January 9th, 2014: Fight Club (1999) - David Fincher

Okay. I had to see the bro-iest of bro movies because walking through life without even understanding this quote:

Meant a lifetime of Fomo and film-major induced shame. But even though Fight Club may be #10 in the IMDb Top 250, it doesn’t even crack the AFI 100 Films list. Even worse! It won zero Oscars. Maybe I should’ve left it off this list?

Oh well. What’s done is done. And to be completely honest, I actually really enjoyed the film. As most critics put it, the idea is there, but the end is a little preachy. The central two characters, as my always well-placed gifs show, are a nameless, boring man with a boring desk job, played by Edward Norton, and the effortlessly cool soap salesman, Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt.

I’m sorry? Brad didn’t get an Oscar for that? Life is unfair.

Anyway. So the narrative arc is very interesting, with the film starting at the climax, with Norton’s character with a gun in his mouth and a bomb about to go off, and then it jumps back to the “real” beginning. After explaining (in narration) that his life is an endless train of waking up and sleeping, and that his insomnia creates a sort of zombie-like state where he never has any idea where he is, he goes to see a doctor who refuses to prescribe him anything. The doctor instead tells him to go to a cancer support group to see some real suffering. At the group, the narrator finds that being surrounded by people who are chronically ill brings him a sort of emotional release from the monotony of his life. He starts going to a different support group every night to keep feeling that euphoria. But one night he meets Marla Singer, played by Helena Bonham Carter, who turns out to be a fraud just like him.

Shortly after dividing up the nights with Marla so they never have to see each other again, the narrator meets Tyler Durden on a plane. Tyler is so much cooler than he is, and all he does is sell soap. Norton’s character goes home that night and finds that his condo has been blown up. He calls Tyler, and the two go out for drinks. After the drinks, Tyler finally says in the parking lot:

The two engage in a brawl, and quickly realize that they have never felt the kind of release they feel while beating each other senseless. This is where it gets sort of crazy. 

Soon enough, Tyler and the narrator have created the Fight Club, an underground “support group” where men beat each other almost to death just to feel anything. And the philosophy is very interesting, because Tyler constantly preaches of the emasculation of our generation as a result of rampant consumerism and commercial ideology. The idea is that constantly being told what we need and what to buy to be happy has taken the meaning out of life, and as men, they must cause each other physical pain just to feel anything anymore. It’s barbaric, but I followed it.

And that’s probably due to Tyler Durden’s charm and allure as a man who seems to be totally and completely understanding of how to be happy. But things go south as soon as he starts putting into motion a plan he has called “Project Mayhem,” which requires members of Fight Club to start vandalizing staples of consumer culture, like franchise coffee shops and computer stores. The narrator begins to draw away from Tyler, and things REALLY get crazy after that.

I definitely did not expect the film to be as philosophical as it was, because prior to having seen the film, it just seemed to me like a wrestling movie that somehow became a cult film amongst teenage boys. But it turns out that Fight Club is actually a thought-provoking piece of art. Who knew?

Most critics consider it to be the most controversial film of 1999, many comparing it to 1971’s A Clockwork Orange for its senseless violence. To me it actually felt more like 2001’s Donnie Darko, being a sort of coming of age story with a twist that the person coming of age is actually pretty mentally disturbed to the point of being almost supernatural. Anyway, the point is I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. So I guess I won’t be judging Brad Pitt films by their cult followings anymore!